I was playing around with the bounce handler today (yeah, Sunday),
since there's sort of a limitation on what it can do -

Currently, the bounce handler knows about "hard" bounces and, "soft"
bounces A hard bounce is usually defined (erm, by me) as a bounced
message because the email address itself does not exist

A soft bounce is basically any other type of bounce Examples: the
email box is full, the message couldn't be sent to the address
because x, y or z, etc

Currently, in the bounce handler, if it finds a hard bounce, it'll
remove the message from the list

If it's a soft bounce, by default, the bounce handler will annoy you
to no end, asking, "What should I do"

Problems with this:

You can most definitely have a false-positive hard bounce How?

• Some bizarre problem with the email's mail server
• There are spam filters that do their job before the message itself
  is received and placed into a mailbox This is pretty aggressive, and
  leads to problems when using Dada Mail's bounce handler If the spam
  filter flags the message, it'll bounce the message back in a way
  that looks like a hard bounce and the email address will be removed
  from the list Now, spam filters aren't perfect, and you, as the
  sender, can't control and usually can't know what flagged in your
  message and the flagged part of the message could, in fact, be
  benign Dada Mail's bounce handler isn't very flexible in this case
• The bounced message was read incorrectly by Dada Mail's bounce
  handler

Solution: Move towards a points-based system

A points based system works using the idea of scoring types of
bounces For example, a soft bounce, because a list subscriber's
mailbox is full and isn't accepting new mail may be scored with a: 1
A message that seems (or is) to be a hard bounce would be scored
with a, 5 Since there's like, a bazillion different types of bounces
the bounce handler currently knows, you can really fine tune this, if
you want

Fine and dandy This whole idea works once you have a threshold you
have to hit For example, if a email address reaches a threshold of,
"10", the email address is now unsubscribed from the mailing list
This basically gives the email address and the email addresses'
server's bouncing mechanism - and your mailing list, a little bit
more forgiveness And it's what everyone else seems to be doing :)

Now, this threshold gets accumulated throughout time Once bounce, a
year ago, may give you a score of, "5", another just yesterday, may
add, "1" to this score - so you know have a score of, "6" If the
threshold is, "10" - no problem, the email address isn't unsubscribed

That's about it Along with being a bit more easy on bounced messages
received, this will also get rid of the problem of getting so many,
"I don't know what to do!" messages from the bounce handler itself
It'll still go, "I don't know what to do", but just add a small score
against the offending email message

As happens now, when a message does get removed because of bounced
messages, an email is sent to the email address stating that, "you've
been removed", as a last chance to re-subscribe So, if the
subscriber is still out there, they shouldn't have a problem being
kept on the list

The implementation that I added the, "Scoring" functionality is the
same implementation as what's already in the bounce handler, so, if
you still want to get the email message alerts from the bounce
handler, or you want an email address unsubscribed right away, or you
don't want to use the scoring system at all - you can do just that
With (most) of the things I make for Dada Mail, this added
functionality is just that: added - if you want to go back to the Old
Ways, you can, if you'd like

I'll most likely check this update to the bounce handler into CVS
pretty darn soon and package it up in a alpha/beta soon enough I'll
be testing the bounce handler on this list, as well as my other lists
even sooner

whew

Questions? Comments?